Beginning DAX with Power BI: The SQL Pro’s Guide to Better Business Intelligence

I had trouble getting into Dax with other books - but this one is the perfect intro

I’ve read plenty of technical code books and “Beginning DAX with Power BI” ranks as one of the best. To often, giant books with multiple authors are dry and a challenge to stay awake to, let alone get excited about. Phil’s approach in this book is refreshing and engaging. His style and use of many different practical examples keeps the reader engaged and wanting to move on to the next section. I particularly enjoyed the small author notes dropped in after some of the examples that warn of common mistakes or provide a tidbit of extra value based on Phil’s many years of experience. Those types of little additions add a lot of value for beginners. In addition, the chapters on “Context” and “Debugging and Optimization” were great to see as those are key elements for all users to understand and pay attention to.This book teaches DAX in an approachable and well written way that leads the user to join along and work through the examples. DAX is certainly a language best learned while doing, rather than memorizing, and this book does a great job of supporting that method. I will certainly be recommending this book to all new users that want a great jump start and solid base in DAX. It will certainly help in expanding their capabilities and drive them towards producing better insights in their reporting efforts in Power BI.

This review strictly pertains to the Kindle version. I was looking forward to learning from this book. However, the formatting is so bad in the Kindle version it's almost unreadable. Everything just sort of runs together with very poor use of spacing. I would not recommend the Kindle version.

This is the best guide to DAX that I have seen in the market. It is more comprehensive and up-to-date than anything I have seen thus far. The organization of the topics are logical and spot-on. When I give presentations that introduce DAX, it is exactly the order that I follow. It is a joy to see someone give Context an entire chapter in a book as I feel it is the key topic that one needs to understand when learning DAX and something that sets DAX apart from other languages. There is a great chapter on Dates but the highlights for me were the Debugging and Optimizing DAX chapter and the Practical DAX chapter. Great information in those chapters. And, the treatment/explanation and examples of the GENERATE function is first rate. I've never understood how to use that function efficiently until now. Overall, Phil seems to have been able to strike a great balance between a book that covers all of the fundamentals but is also written very much for the practical DAX user. There are so many nuggets of wisdom presented in this book I can already see that it is going to be my go to reference when I get stuck. Now if only Phil could replicate this book for Power Query (M) code I'd have every reference book I'd ever need for Power BI!

Please be aware, that this review is a copy of my review on the german amazon website. Unfortunately this review does not show up here, but this book deserves better.This is the first book I read about DAX (and I have read a lot) that provides a concise and first of all an easy to read introduction into the mysterious FILTER CONTEXT. It also covers the latest development of DAX by comparing different functions that have surfaced over time and are doing more or less all the same, summarizing a table, but Phil explains their own twists. Phil provides great examples when to use which of the summarizing functions like SUMMARIZE, SUMMARIZECOLUMNS, or GROUPBY.Another great chapter is about JOINS, emphasizing the importance of relationships.Personally I consider myself an expert in the field of DAX, but I found some new ideas and approaches reading this book.This will be the recommendation in all my DAX trainings.It was a fun read!

If you are looking for a book which will help you not only learn DAX but also make it go faster, this is the book you want to read. Phil has a number of examples where he shows the DAX code and the equivalent SQL code, which is very helpful for those who know SQL and want to see how to do something they know how to do in SQL in DAX. Phil starts out with the basics, then builds upon the concepts starting with variables, moving to filtering concepts then to tuning and creating test data sets. The only complaint I has is that this book as "Beginning" in the title which may keep some people from learning some of the great topics Phil covers here that are not available other places. You know from the first few pages that this is going to be a good book as one of the inventors of DAX was the technical reviewer, so do yourself a favor and pick this book up.

Poor illustrations and contentExamples were not well elaborated.Not enough visuals and comparisons between data source and tool.Data source not found

For anyone learning Power BI, regardless of background, one of the most challenging aspects is the DAX language.Beginning DAX with Power BI is an excellent resource for all Power BI users, whether complete beginners or more advanced.Phil Seamark presents DAX in all its glory, from basic definitions and examples to some quite advanced applications. The examples provided clearly reflect a wealth of experience as a Power BI practitioner, and will be relevant to a wide range of Power BI users.The core concepts are covered excellently, including the data model, context and filtering. There are some great examples of table functions and emphasis on the power of DAX as a query language.I was also pleased to see coverage of such practical topics as debugging & optimizing, code formatting and variables!While I consider myself reasonably experienced with DAX, I gleaned a number of useful techniques from this book, and found myself repeatedly saying "aha" as I read through. I will be referring to this book for years to come!